SEOUL (THE KOREA HERALD/ASIA NEWS NETWORK) - Korea Train Express' bullet train tickets for the Chuseok holiday period to most cities in the southern part of South Korea opened early on Tuesday (Aug 28) morning - and sold out almost instantly.
The Korean equivalent of Thanksgiving, Chuseok, which follows the lunar calendar, runs from Sept 23 through to Sept 25 this year.
On Tuesday morning, Ms Lee Ja-yoon's alarm went off at 6.30am, an hour before her usual wake-up time.
The 27-year-old office worker, who lives in Seoul but is originally from Busan, has grown accustomed to the annual ritual of reserving round-trip train tickets online ahead of Chuseok, but after three years, she still feels her stomach clench as she sits in front of her laptop waiting for ticket sales to open.
Just in case her laptop's built-in digital clock is wrong, Ms Lee has another online clock open on a separate screen. Her palms are wet with perspiration as she signs in to the Korail website, browses, and tries to figure out which of several train itineraries best fits her work schedule.
Serenity sets in at 6.59am, and Ms Lee quietly watches the seconds go by in the countdown to 7am.
With confidence and speed, Ms Lee dexterously moves her mouse and madly clicks away in what Koreans call "gwangcle" - clicking one's mouse in a fervid attempt to reserve something online.
Her first-choice tickets are already gone within seconds, but she manages to acquire seats on the Korea Train Express bullet train at manageable departure times. With the morning drama done, Ms Lee gets ready for another day at work.
As a young worker who has left her hometown to work in the capital city, Ms Lee is not alone in the endeavour to make a trip home on national holidays such as Chuseok and Seollal (Lunar New Year).
Some of Ms Lee's friends even make an early-morning trip to the neighbourhood's 24-hour Internet cafes or PC rooms, where the computers have faster broadband connections, to raise the chances of getting tickets with their preferred departure times.
Highway congestion for the national holiday exodus out of Seoul is unpleasant, and the Korea Train Express bullet train provides a much more desirable mode of travel.
